MAKING ROOM
For Laura Currie, who works under the studio name Loveday Barnes, becoming an artist hasn't felt like a change of direction so much as a long-overdue admission.
Her working life has taken several shapes. Laura trained and worked as a lawyer after university, then moved into design, spending close to a decade as a digital designer in Auckland. Freelance work followed, and eventually a return to law. Painting ran underneath all of it, a constant even as everything else shifted.
Eventually the feeling that painting deserved more room became too persistent to ignore.
Her process is intuitive but rooted in observation. She's drawn to familiar things: botanical forms, overheard fragments of conversation, the small unremarkable details of daily life. She works these away from literal representation until colour and shape stop describing an object and start carrying a feeling instead.
Much of her recent work sits with change and impermanence: growth, decay, memory, the marks things leave behind after they've gone. Her latest series, Groundwork, follows cycles of emergence, transformation and return. It draws on the Latin root humilis, meaning close to the earth, and asks what it means to stay connected to the material conditions everything grows from. Decaying still life floral arrangements come apart on the canvas, caught somewhere between recognisable and abstract. The paintings sit with the idea that everything is shaped by becoming, and just as surely, by falling away.
Living in Northland has given Laura the room to build this practice around the rest of life's demands. Her studio is part of the Blackshed Art Space in Waipu, where she works alongside a handful of other local artists across different disciplines, bound less by medium than by the pull to make things.
Law taught her precision: clear briefs, defined outcomes, a right answer to find. Painting asks the opposite of her. It rewards wandering and the unknown. Increasingly, what draws her back to the canvas is that discovery itself, the escape of following a question somewhere new each time.
Laura's Groundwork exhibition will be held later this year. Details will be announced via her Instagram and website.
